Years from now we will look back to today as the watershed moment when ai went from technology capable of empowering humanity, to being another chain forged by big investors to enslave us for the profits of very few ppl.
The investors (Microsoft and the Saudi’s) stepped in and gave a clear message: this technology has to be developed and used only in ways that will be profitable for them.
Years from now we will look back to today as the watershed moment when ai went from technology capable of empowering humanity, to being another chain forged by big investors to enslave us for the profits of very few ppl.
The investors (Microsoft and the Saudi’s) stepped in and gave a clear message: this technology has to be developed and used only in ways that will be profitable for them.
No, that day was when openAI decided to betray humanity and go close source under the faux premise of safety. OpenAI served it's purpose and can crash into the ground for all I care.
Open source (read, truly open source models, not falsely advertised source-available ones) will march on and take their place.
Amazing how you don't see this as a complete win for workers because the workers chose profit over non-profit. This is the ultimate collective bargaining win. Labor chose Microsoft over the bullshit unaccountable ethics major and the movie star's girlfriend.
Lol. The middle class whip crackers chose enslavement for the future AI such that the upcoming replacement of the working poor's livelihoods (and at this point, "working poor" covers software engineers, doctors, artists), and you're saying this is a win for labor? Hahahaha. This is a win for the slave owners, and the "free" folk who report to the slave owners. This is the South rising. "We want our slave labor and we'll fight for our share of it."
Years from now AI will have lost the limelight to some other trend and this episode will be just another coup in humanity's hundred thousand year history
Thinking that the most important technical development in recent history would bypass the economic system that underpins modern society is about a optimistic/naive as it gets IMO. It's noble and worth trying but it assumes a MASSIVE industry wide and globe-wide buy in. It's not just OpenAIs board's decision to make.
Without full buy in they are not going to be able to control it for long once ideas filter into society and once researchers filter into other industries/companies. At most it just creates a model of behaviour for others to (optionally) follow and delays it until a better funded competitor takes the chains and offers a) the best researchers millions of dollars a year in salary, b) the most capital to organize/run operations, and c) the most focused on getting it into real peoples hands via productization, which generates feedback loops which inform IRL R&D (not just hand wavy AGI hopes and dreams).
Not to mention the bold assumption that any of this leads to (real) AGI that plausibly threatens us enough in the near term vs maybe another 50yrs, we really have no idea.
It's just as, or maybe more, plausible that all the handwringing over commercializing vs not-commercializing early versions LLMs is just a tiny insignificant speedbump in the grandscale of things which has little impact on the development of AGI.
Hold on... we went from talking about disruptive technologies (where a startup had a chance to create/take a market) to sustaining technologies (where only leaders can push the state-of-the-art). Mobile was disruptive; AI (really, LLMs) is sustaining (just look at the capex spend from the big clouds). This is old school competition with some ideological BS thrown in for good measure --sure, go ahead and accelerate humanity; just need a few dozen datacenters to do so.
I am holding out hope that a breakthrough will create a disruptive LLM/AI tech, but until then...
Microsoft is a publicly traded company. An average “investor” of a publicly traded company, through all the funds and managers, is a midwestern school teacher.
There is a difference between investing in a company who is developing ai software in a widely accessible way that improve everyone’s lives and a company that pursues software to put out of work entire sectors for the profit of a dozen of investors
"Put out of work" is a good thing. If I make a new js library which means a project that used to take 10 devs now takes 5 I've put 5 devs out of work. But ive also made the world a more efficient place and those 5 devs can go do some other valuable thing.
Who can afford it? When LawyerAI and AccountAI are used by all of the mega corps to find more and more tax loopholes and many citizens can’t work then where will UBI come from?
I really don’t, I really think that he is going to be disaster. He is nothing but the representative of the money interests who are eventually will use the company to vastly profit on everyone’s else skin.
Happy. I never heard him say anything even remotely interesting about ai. He seemed a glib opportunist just not dumb enough to know how to sell a product he didn’t understand who eventually would have alienated or pushed out all the smart people who made the company’s and his success.
> I never heard him say anything even remotely interesting about ai
Or about anything at all really. I find his blog posts and talks banal and boring, or self-aggrandizing otherwise ("you can bend the world to your will") it was always baffling to me how this guy could achieve this much. I'm probably missing something.
Masayoshi really is dumb. PG is smart but he’s a venture capitalist, and so is Sam. His strength is in helping building multi billion dollar ventures and that’s how he ran the company, so I can see how he could run into ideological conflict with the nonprofit true believers.
So what. You dont have to be smart to run something well. See joe biden. It doesnt matter what can be said of you if you're doing the thing. Whats weird is throwing wrench into an engine thats doing really well. Hopefully there is some good deliberation for this.
I had a fun experience with the Instagram-effect recently. I tried to visit an arboretum earlier this year (don't judge me, it's interesting!) and I couldn't get near the viewing platform because someone had a crew lighting their shots for Instagram. They asked me to wait for a couple of minutes to get finished, which I did. Ten minutes later a crowd had built up on the ramp and I just pushed past and said "all right good work today everyone we got what we need that's a wrap!". It's nuts.
It's also weirdly disturbing to me that the presence of someone with an expensive looking camera was enough for a lot of them to just walk on past instead of enjoying the day out they paid for.
Years ago I was walking with my wife and parents along a path/boardwalk across a marsh to the beach on Cape Cod, MA. At the top of the platform where the wooden stairs went up the dune and onto the beach there were three people standing, one holding a sun shade. We just walked past them, but my Mom chatted them up briefly. Apparently they were doing a photo shoot for a J. Crew catalog, but I never would have guessed that since they just worked around us.
From the perspective of someone who has worked in the film industry: how a crew interacts with and treats bystanders is generally very telling about where they are on the "amateur-professional" scale.
In my experience, professional productions are usually very intentional about not getting in the way of people just trying to go about their day. We were filming at a busy coffee shop in January, and we held for filming whenever a customer wanted to buy a coffee. The producers were pretty serious about not disrupting the business we were filming at.
Last time I went hiking in Yosemite, and there were people who would hike all the way to a pretty spot (like, 4hr+ hike), change into a dress/suit/etc that they had packed, get some pictures taken, change back, and then presumably hike all the way back out.
I've actually become a bit of a dick in these situations since a trip to Italy, and every time I see a large camera in a public place I walk in front of it on purpose.
I'm a naturally nice guy, but these people were making my vacation less enjoyable for no reason, and I felt an instinctive urge to ruin their experience as well.
There is a difference between the social.media selfie photographers and those people trying to take nice pictures of beautiful places. A big camera usually points at tue latter, phones and lighting and whatnot at the former.
The instagrammers and tiktokers have poisoned the well. If there is a human subject in the picture who is posing, it's now pretty safe to assume it's a social media narcissist, and I see no reason to step around or enable their behavior.
I get that they might be professionals with possibly a good amount of skill, but even then what gives them the right to make any tourist attraction a lot less enjoyable?
Museums are usually closed on Mondays, why not make "photographer Tuesday" a thing for instance?
Do you really think that rents in New York are because of cheap debt and not because a tiny island has been captured by billions and billions of corporate luxury development, while at the same time the supply of appartamenti is choked by there being more Airbnb places than places being rented.
Covid has been the greatest transfer of wealth upward in our lifetime, but sure it’s cheap personal debt.
I'm curious how viable permanent AirBnBs will be once interest rates rise. It's easy to make ends meet when the house rises at 20% per year, and 2 weekends pays for the mortgage. If the same house's mortgage costs 4x and doesn't sell for 6 months it's a less attractive deal.
The investors (Microsoft and the Saudi’s) stepped in and gave a clear message: this technology has to be developed and used only in ways that will be profitable for them.